Nanoscale Engineering Transforms The Modern Battery

The New Field Of Nanoscale Engineering.

You would have to have been living in a cave not to have noticed that batteries are needed everywhere. I mean consider for a moment all the different types of devices that need a battery. There are electric vehicles,cell phones,laptops, tablets,music player and now large-scale energy storage on the electrical grid.

All of these applications are limited by the capacity, lifetime and safety of current battery technologies.

So-many-things-that-we-need-need-batteries

This lecture discusses new chemistries and materials, now being explored by reasearchers around the world, that could transform the effectiveness of batteries.

New Science Needed In The Form of Nanoscale Engineering.

The new battery materials require nanoscale engineering, and an important part of this work is the ability to observe their performance during battery operation at the scale of atoms and molecules using the X-ray beams at SLAC.

How far can battery technology take us?

These new approaches put us on a path to storing much more energy in a given volume of battery material, thus making batteries smaller, lighter and cheaper, while also increasing their safety and lifespan.

Using xray technology to analyize battery efficiency

About the speaker:

Yi Cui is an associate professor at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He received his BS from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1998 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2002. He was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2003 to 2005 and joined the Stanford faculty in 2005. Cui is an associate editor of Nano Letters and a co-director of the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

In 2008, he founded Amprius Inc. to commercialize high-energy battery technology.

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About Gordon SmithGordon's expertise in the area of industrial energy efficiency and alternative energy. He is an experienced electrical engineer with a Masters degree in Alternative Energy technology. He is the co-founder of several renewable energy media sites including Solar Thermal Magazine.